Plumes of icy material extend above the southern
polar region of Saturn's moon Enceladus, as imaged by the Cassini spacecraft
in January 2005. The monochrome view is presented along with a color-coded
image on the right. The view in this image is perpendicular to the tiger
stripe fractures that straddle the south pole. Another plume view,
PIA07798,
was taken one month later and looks along the tiger stripe fractures. See
PIA06247 for
a view of the tiger stripe features.

Images like these are being analyzed by scientists as
they seek to explain the processes that could be producing such incredible
features. As reported in the journal Science on March 10, 2006, imaging
scientists believe that the plumes are geysers erupting from pressurized
subsurface reservoirs of liquid water above 273 degrees Kelvin (0 degrees
Celsius).

These images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 209,400 kilometers
(130,100 miles) from Enceladus at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase,
angle of 148 degrees. The image scale is about 1.3 kilometer (0.8 mile) per
pixel.

A slightly different version of this image product was
released in Nov. 2005. See
PIA07760.

The mosaic is an orthographic projection centered at
46.8 degrees south latitude, 188 degrees west longitude, and has an image
scale of 67 meters (220 feet) per pixel. The original images ranged in
resolution from 67 meters per pixel to 350 meters (1,150 feet) per pixel and
were taken at distances ranging from 11,100 to 61,300 kilometers (6,900 to
miles) from Enceladus.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project
of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology
in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate,
Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were
designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is
based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.